What the house charges, and what changed on 1 September
The public preview of Christie's Hong Kong 20th/21st Century autumn sales opened on Tuesday 22 September and runs eight days to the 29th, 10:30 to 17:30 daily, on the sixth floor of The Henderson, 2 Murray Road in Central. Entry is free. Christie's, the London-founded auction house, keeps its Asia Pacific headquarters in that building and is marking 40 years in Asia this year. The single preview covers all three sessions.
Those sessions are posted on Christie's own sale pages. The 20th/21st Century Evening Sale takes lots 1 to 51 on Tuesday 29 September from 19:00. The 20th Century Day Sale takes lots 101 to 168 on Wednesday 30 September from 13:30, and the 21st Century Day Sale takes lots 201 to 273 the same afternoon from 16:30. One room, 192 lots, three sessions.
What each of those lots costs is settled by a document that is not in the catalogue. Christie's Conditions of Sale say it outright: estimates "do not include the buyer's premium" — the house's own fee, charged to the winning bidder on top of the hammer price. For Hong Kong that fee changed on 1 September 2026.
The new schedule is published on Christie's own buying-guide page headed "How to buy at Christie's | Financial information", dated "Effective 1 September 2026", and repeated in the Hong Kong Conditions of Sale that the lot pages of this sale link to. It charges 28 per cent of the hammer up to and including HK$15,000,000, 22 per cent on the part above that up to HK$60,000,000, and 15 per cent on anything above HK$60,000,000.
The version it replaced is still on the same site. Christie's Hong Kong Conditions of Sale dated 7 May 2024, which the house still serves at its own address, charges 26 per cent, 21 per cent and 15 per cent, with the first tranche ending at HK$7,500,000. The difference between the two documents is not a rounding matter. At a HK$10,000,000 hammer it is HK$325,000.
The line below HK$15 million
Up to that first threshold the premium is a single multiplication, and the multiple does not move:
| Hammer price | Buyer's premium | All-in cost | Loading |
|---|---|---|---|
| HK$390,000 | HK$109,200 | HK$499,200 | 1.28x |
| HK$1,000,000 | HK$280,000 | HK$1,280,000 | 1.28x |
| HK$5,000,000 | HK$1,400,000 | HK$6,400,000 | 1.28x |
| HK$15,000,000 | HK$4,200,000 | HK$19,200,000 | 1.28x |
| HK$33,000,000 | HK$8,160,000 | HK$41,160,000 | 1.247x |
| HK$76,000,000 | HK$16,500,000 | HK$92,500,000 | 1.217x |
Read backwards, the schedule answers the question a buyer with a fixed sum actually asks. HK$500,000 all-in buys a hammer of about HK$391,000. HK$1,000,000 buys about HK$781,000. HK$5,000,000 buys about HK$3,906,000. These are ceilings rather than targets: the reserve sits at or below the low estimate, and the last step is the auctioneer's. Christie's own note on increments says bidding generally opens below the low estimate and advances in increments of up to 10 per cent, subject to the auctioneer's discretion.
Applied to this sale, the ceiling matters most in the two day sessions, because that is where the volume is. Of the 141 lots on 30 September, 94 — 66.7 per cent — come in at or under HK$1,000,000 all-in if bought at the low estimate. Buy them at the high estimate instead and the count falls to 71, half the session. At a HK$500,000 all-in budget the same pair of numbers is 57 and 31. In the evening sale, by contrast, three of the 51 lots clear HK$1,000,000 all-in at the low estimate.
The 13 lots the change repriced
The 1 September change moved the first tranche boundary from HK$7,500,000 to HK$15,000,000 and raised the rate on it from 26 to 28 per cent. A hammer landing between those two figures was charged 21 per cent under the 2024 schedule and is charged 28 per cent now, so every lot estimated inside that slice got more expensive to buy without its estimate moving.
Thirteen lots in this sale carry a low estimate inside that slice, ten of them in the evening session. Two of the cheapest are lot 11, Nicolas Party's Still Life, and lot 24, Wu Guanzhong's Hong Kong at Night (Tsim Sha Tsui), both at HK$8,000,000 to HK$12,000,000: a HK$8,000,000 hammer now carries HK$2,240,000 of premium where the 2024 schedule asked HK$2,055,000, a difference of HK$185,000. The largest gap in the sale sits at the top of the slice, on lot 33, Zao Wou-Ki's 19.04.89 at HK$15,000,000 to HK$25,000,000, where the premium is HK$4,200,000 against HK$3,525,000 — HK$675,000.
The same slice catches the 20th Century Day Sale's Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild (lot 115, HK$8,000,000 to HK$12,000,000) and two 21st Century day lots, Yoshitomo Nara's Q & A (lot 211) and Yayoi Kusama's A PUMPKIN (TSS) (lot 213). None of this will be announced in the room. It took effect three weeks before the gavel.
Four lots at the top of the evening sale carry a "first" in the house's release of 9 September, and the wording differs on each. Yayoi Kusama's A-Pumpkin (YHP) (lot 5, HK$48,000,000 to HK$68,000,000) is an auction debut; Christie's prints the artist's dates as 1929-2026. Chu Teh-Chun's Automne (Autumn) (lot 26, HK$25,000,000 to HK$35,000,000) is also an auction debut. Paul Cézanne's L'Assiette bleue (lot 6, the same estimate) is offered at auction in Hong Kong for the first time. Sir Peter Paul Rubens's Landscape with willows (lot 31, HK$6,000,000 to HK$8,000,000) is the Baroque painter's first appearance at auction in more than 200 years. On the current schedule the Kusama's low estimate alone costs HK$59,460,000 all-in, and the Cézanne's costs HK$32,000,000.
What this means for the Hong Kong buyer
If you are the reader this is written for — a Hong Kong collector with HK$1m to HK$5m and a paddle — the schedule says three things. Budget the multiple, not the estimate: your HK$1m is a HK$781,000 hammer, and a lot's low estimate is not your number. Walk the day sales first: 30 September holds 141 of the 192 lots, and two-thirds of them are reachable under HK$1m all-in at the low estimate, against three of the 51 evening lots. And watch the line at HK$15,000,000, where the rate on the next slice drops to 22 per cent: the premium on a hammer either side of that boundary is calculated differently, so two lots with adjacent estimates are not equivalent purchases.
One more piece of discipline. The premium is fixed and published; almost nothing else on the seller's side of the same contract is. What a consignor pays, and what a minimum-price guarantee costs, lives in a contract the houses do not publish, which this desk set out in the consignor's contract: floors, overage and the irrevocable bid. The buyer's half is the half you can check in advance.
Dates to watch
The evening sale is Tuesday 29 September at 19:00, and the two day sales are Wednesday 30 September at 13:30 and 16:30, all on the sixth floor at The Henderson. Christie's results pages will carry hammer prices, and every one of them can be run through the schedule above in seconds. Watch the lots in the repriced slice first: the ten in the evening sale are where the 1 September change bites hardest.
After that, 24 November: Christie's Hong Kong Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite autumn auction, in the same room, with a Hong Kong preview from 19 to 24 November, per the house's release of 15 September. The jewellery catalogue publishes in October, and its arithmetic will be the same 28-22-15 applied to materially larger numbers — a 10.10-carat Burmese ruby and diamond brooch by Cartier is among the announced highlights. Estimates for that sale are not yet published, so there is nothing to calculate yet; by the time they are, this schedule is the one that will apply.
